Sound Off on Senator Buttars

Utah State Senator Chris Buttars (R-West Jordan) recently led a panel discussion about education at the Utah Eagle Forum annual convention. Buttars and the rest of the panel members made a number of comments about their fears that a Communist agenda is being shoved down the gullets of Utah school children, and of course, global warming is one of the topics Buttars and his panel alleged were being pushed in the curriculum by the Commies.

The Utah State School Board has put up a website to solicit public comments about the Eagle Forum panel’s anti-intellectual crusade. Please go leave your comments ASAP! (At least if you aren’t a black-helicopter-watching extremist like Buttars and his crew. If you are, click repeatedly on the invisible button in the center of your screen. Don’t worry if nothing happens at first–just keep clicking until the Communist threat has vanished. Your country depends on you.)

Here’s the comment I left.

As both a Republican and an Earth scientist, I find Sen. Buttars’ comment about global warming to be ridiculous. There is very strong evidence that humans are causing significant climate change. When the vast majority of climate scientists agree on this, why shouldn’t the schools teach it? When the schools start teaching kids what the political response to the situation should be, it might be legitimate to start complaining about the schools pushing a particular political agenda. But until then, it’s clear that Buttars is just peddling his usual anti-intellectual nonsense.

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Here is the comment I posted:

As a taxpaying citizen of Utah who was born here, a father of two, and an environmental scientist who’s spent the past decade conducting research on the human dimensions of global environmental change (including climate change), I find Buttar’s comments to lack any objective, empirical, or rational merit. Well over 97% of the world’s scientific community agrees that to some extent anthropogenic (i.e., human caused) greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change. This is a level of consensus that is in fact higher than what if often normative in medical research (one of many examples) when studying the causes of illness, disease, and the effectiveness of new treatments and medications in curing such ailments.

Further, a large body of research done by political scientists (etc.)that involves analyses of correctly randomized and stratified samples shows that the political orientation of academics and the general scientific community is generally no more “liberal” or “conservative” than that of the broader populations in which they reside, and in fact, those in the earth and biological sciences tend to be more moderate and / or conservative than those in the social sciences, the latter of which tend to be moderate in their political orientations. And last I checked, moderate political leanings in the US are not communist in character and orientation.

Such ignorant public statements–like Buttars’ recent statements about climate change and communism–harm our community in general and our children in particular.